As iOS and Android-powered tablets continue to be trailblazers in the market, Microsoft's Surface is having a hard time finding its place -- and it shows in analyst expectations.

A Bloomberg source anonymously revealed that Microsoft has sold 1.5 million Surface tablets to date. More specifically, the company has sold a little over a million Surface with Windows RT tablets (features the Windows RT version of Windows 8 specifically for ARM processors) and about 400,000 Surface with Windows Pro tablets (features the full version of Windows 8 and an Intel Core i5 processor).

These numbers are not exactly what analysts expected this late in the game. Brent Thill, an analyst at UBS AG, had previously predicted that Microsoft would sell 2 million Surface RT tablets in just the December quarter.

Now, analysts are lowering Surface shipment estimates for the current quarter and beyond. Brendan Barnicle, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities, lowered his Surface sales projections from 1.4 million to 600,000 for the current quarter.

Barnicle also reduced his Surface sales estimate from 7 million to 5 million for fiscal 2014. Rick Sherlund, an analyst at Nomura Holdings Inc., decreased his estimate for the PCs and Windows-based tablet market from a growth of 5 percent to a decline of 1 percent.

Why is the Surface such a flop so far? Reports cite consumer unfamiliarity with the Windows 8 OS, Surface's fail at successfully packaging the power of a PC combined with the ease-of-use of a tablet, and fewer apps as some reasons. A high price point would be a fair reason as well (the Surface RT is $499 for 32GB and $599 for 64GB while the Surface Pro is $899 for 64GB and $999 for 128GB).

Currently, the Windows Store has a little over 47,000 apps. Apple's App Store has over 300,000 apps for the iPad. In the quarter ended December 2012, Apple sold 22.9 million iPads and it accounted for 51 percent of the tablet market.

However, Android tablets are expected to give the iPad a run for its money this year. According to IDC, iPad shipments are expected to make up 46 percent of the tablet market for 2013, down from that 51 percent in 2012. Android-powered tablets are expected to increase their market share to 49 percent in 2013, up from 42 percent in 2012.

Back in December, Boston-based brokerage firm Detwiler Fenton said that Surface's main problem was distribution. Customers could only buy the Surface with Windows RT tablet at Microsoft Stores, and the issue with that is there's only 31 of them, with another 34 smaller Microsoft kiosks around the U.S. The lack of exposure at places like Best Buy and Staples was hurting the tablet after its Oct. 26 release.

$163 for a 10.1" Android tablet and a keyboard/folder case. Boom - instant "Surface" tablet, that does everything that 99.99999% of all people want/need to do with a tablet, for nearly $340 less. You could buy 3 such Android tablets and keyboard folders and still have money left over for lunch compared to a $500 Surface.

Issues with the OS aside, that's why people aren't falling over each other to buy the Surface. Why would you?

400000 Surface Pro in 1 month since in on market, not bad for a 999$ tablet actually!Of course cheap sells. There are many more McDonald's dollar value burgers sold in the world than expensive 5 services meals at a 200$ restaurant.

Where are the Acer/Asus/Samsung tablet sales numbers? We should combine all Clovertrail/corei3/cCorei5 with Windows 8 pro sales. Game is still Young, i know many more people without a tablet than people with a tablet.Where are the android full numbers? not just 42% market share crap.Written from my surface pro attached to my Bluetooth 5500MX revolution combo and LG 27'' screen. Used as a full office computer.

I'm buying a Surface Pro with my 1st quarter bonus. While the RT didn't seem that interesting, there really is no comparing the Pro to other tablets on the market. It's a far more capable device and, with RDP back to my home workstation, is fully capable of replacing my mobile workstation. That's pretty impressive if you ask me.

You realize that close to no one, when looking at the market as a whole, has any idea what RDP is, right?

As for being a "more capable" device...the vast majority of tablet users use their tablets to surf the web, troll Facebook, and play Angry Birds. It wouldn't matter what else the thing is capable of, because it's irrelevant.

Yep, i was going to suggest pocketcloud pro for Windows RDP connections. I have it and it works great. There are plenty of RDP and VNC apps out there. I find the Windows 8 devices to be useless without most the apps that I use being available. Things such as spotify don't have native Windows 8/Windows RT support.

VNC on the iPad works excellently. I was using RDP for awhile but VNC works with all my servers.

Windows shot themselves in the head when they made Win8 completely different. From before Win 3.1 even to Win 7 it was consistent and people kept using windows because it was familiar. Now that they changed everything in Win8, there was no incentive to keep using Windows.

I recently got a Dell XPS 10. (Far more capable WinRT machine than Microsoft's.) I use it for a lot more than that, so far. I use it at work for remote access to the KVMs in my racks, email, retrieving documented data, (it really has too small of a keyboard to edit documents on any regular basis) call up server reports and other remote administration, remote desktop to servers, Angry Birds, reading ebooks on Kindle and Nook apps, and finally surfing the web.

The dual core Qualcomm chip in the Dell is a far better choice than MS's choice of a Tegra 3. Tablets are mostly dealing with simple, single threaded apps, and a dual core with faster single threaded performance is far better than relying on multithreaded performance.

Honestly, MS made a few missteps with the Surface, but the OS isn't one of them.

Not really sure what your point is in this thread. MS stock price isn't on the line when talking about Surface... They sold fewer than Android or iOS tablets...

And? They are not going to stop building them. And they will continue to put out the only tablet with legacy x86 support, and that alone makes it worth more to a lot of people than anything "free" from Google.

RT is a kneejerk reaction to pressure Intel to get Atom where it needs to be.. The ONLY tablet I would consider for doing anything useful is a Win 8 tablet with Atom or Core i7..

Here in NZ, CT Windows Pro tablets are not much more expensive than Androids, and offer best of both worlds - size, weight, battery life of iPad or Android, with extra functionality of PC.

But considering how much time took for Android tablets to start selling, while competing only with iPads, it is easy to predict that it will be even harder for Windows tablets - they compete with both iPads and Androids, after all.

So I'm not really discouraged with slow WinTab sales; in fact, I'd really be surprised if they were amazingly good. They have great uphill to overcome, but I believe they will get there. Only thing is, I think their entry point will be through enterprise, rather than consumer market. Businesses will start taking them in for obvious advantages, and that, in return, will give people chance to get firsthand experience with WinTabs and chance to like them, thus selecting them later on for their homes as well.

Actually, what I was saying is that I found much more capability and use out of this tablet than I originally anticipated. In addition, WinRT is far more corporate security capable than either iPads or Android tablets. I'm betting if more people were to actually try it, they'd find more use than they would have guessed, and they'd be happier than they would be with other tablets, especially in corporate environments. WinRT is far more advanced and capable than the other tablets out there, and it is worth the price.

Now, if the stupid critics who have no idea what they're talking about because they haven't actually used Win8 or WinRT would just shut up, people would likely try these WinRT tablets more often and tablets in general would catch on.

And the target of the Surface Pro isn't a part of this "Vast Majority" you mention. It's for people like me that want to carry a single device to replace a consumer tablet and a windows laptop. The Surface Pro fits the bill perfectly. It's extremely portable, extremely powerful, lets me run all the actual windows Apps I need, use it as a work machine, and I can still to tablety things with it.

Just because the "Vast Majority" doesn't need it, doesn't make it an undesirable device.

You won't regret it! I picked a 64GB version up about a month ago; it really lets Windows 8 Pro shine. LOVE the pressure-sensitive stylus (with Autodesk Sketchbook Pro) and aside from a few applications (FileMaker Pro 12 doesn't activate the onscreen keyboard automatically in a text field for some reason), everything works well and FAST!

Really impressed with it -- I use it more than my Sammy Chronos 7 17" laptop at this point. I gotta recommend you go with the 128GB version, though. Using a 64GB SD as secondary storage kind of takes away from the experience; wish I would have waited until 128GB units were readily available.

I'm a Systems Engineer with a high requirement for virtualization. My current "laptop" is a 17" Elitebook mobile workstation with 32GB of memory running VMware Workstation with numerous VMs for various activities, including labs, demos and proof of concepts. The Surface Pro can replace everything about my laptop except for that. Fortunately my home workstation can do all of that, and even better than, my laptop can currently.

So you're right, RDP is a poor explanation since I didn't go into detail. But since I can do presentations, get good battery life, and dock it at the office and use it as my full time work system it's a perfect device. For me.

No other tablet can do that the way the Surface Pro can. I'm not saying that the iPad and Android devices don't meet a lot of people's needs, I get that they do. They don't meet mine however. And I've tried.

So, it sounds like you are using it as your primary computer and doing a lot of Windows specific stuff locally. That's pretty much the ideal situation for a Surface Pro (if size/portability is important).

I also agree that "laptop" should be in quotes regarding your workstation. :) In my situation, I'm able to run that kind of thing remotely, and I prefer to keep it that way!

The point of the surface pro is not that it is your primary computer. That is like saying if you own a laptop you should not own a desktop because the laptop should be your primary computer.

I am a tech guy, but I have a desktop at home, a desktop at my office, and the surface pro as my laptop (which replaced a several year old actual laptop). I can RDP around to and from wherever I need to.

quote: The point of Surface Pro is that it's your primary computer, and you should not need another workstation - at all.

LIKE HELL! No tablet in todays world could EVER replace my main workstation. A tablet is a bonus machine, that is all. That said, I'd take an x86 windows 8 tablet over any other platform on the market... why, because I view them as Laptops without keyboards. The are low end PC's with touch screens instead of keyboards. They are NOT angry birds machines like some people would like. I know I don't represent the vast majority of users out there but I do represent a sizable market. You say it's 1% I say it's more like 10 - 20%. Otherwise companies that build high end PCs and computer components wouldn't exist. They would only build for the low to mid range systems. I find it a bit sad that people don't see high end tablets as viable because the rest of the world just wants to shoot pigs with birds and touch porn on the Internet with their finger. Tablets are not giant phones, they're computers. This is NOT a post PC world.

We got two HP win 8 pro devices (i use the term pro loosely, they are Intel atoms!) to try out at work this week and user feedback was overwhelmingly negative so we won't be buying them to replace our hundreds of iPads. On full screen apps, the keyboard works quite well. On desktop apps? It takes up half the screen and you can't see the text box you are typing into (eg google). Other than office integration, this doesn't seem to add much. A shame, as people were initially quite enthusiastic at the unboxing, and being able to have a USB connection dongle is quite nice, although it feels suitably retro after having devices for so long that don't need them. We requested surface pros but MS couldn't find anywhere to supply them to us in the UK within 2 days.

There are plenty of RDP like solutions for iPad and my mini can do that with its 320gm weight and 10 hours of battery for most tasks even light video editing, so why go PRO and paying 3X the money ?.

The level of compromises for each user comes in many different angles and other could wrestle out nice software tools to make things a lot easier than a traditional notebook. So for many it becomes tablet and Desktop only solution and the notebook is left to dry (obsoleted).

I've been looking at getting $300 Asus tablet with the tegra3 chipset, I figure that is about the best tablet for the $$ but I have yet to be so inclined to make the purchase.

I played around with a surface, and unless you had a specific business program that would require the pro version, I couldn't see they value. The RT has some additional features that are nice, but for the average user it is too expensive and too bulky, IMO. Also, the surface keyboard that is like a "glorified microwave keypad" seems useless to me. I have also seen another surface with a more netbook style chiklet keyboard that would probably be more useful.

I HIGHLY recommend the Dell XPS 10 instead. It uses a Qualcomm dual core Snapdragon S4, which is much faster on single threaded apps, which is mostly what happens on tablets. Plus, the keyboard dock has an extra battery, giving extended battery life.

I use it in tablet mode when playing Angry Birds or reading Kindle books, but switch to netbook mode (docked) when using it at work for documents, email, and server remote consoles.

More than 0.00001% of the population is interested in content creation. So your number is just hyperbole. But, the point is otherwise valid. That pretty much applies to your later comment about RDP.

Here are my thoughts. I was ready to buy the Surface Pro even at $1,000. But that was only true after using it. I still really want one. I'm annoyed with the cost of the type cover. But, what pushed me away was the battery. I didn't expect a great battery with all of that power. But, not that piss poor. And the straw was that the battery cannot be replaced.

If you need a tactical keyboard, a mouse or trackpad, then why buy one of these at all? Why not just buy a real laptop that has considerably more power? I really think MS is missing the point of tablets. Thin, light, inexpensive but great for consuming content on the road or on the couch. Dedicated professional apps make tablets great for business use out in the field too.

Well I wonder what they are thinking, I live in Luxemburg, in the heart of Europe, and we only got Surface RT like 2 Weeks ago into the retail stores. I asked the guys in the stores when they expected to get Surface Pro, and they had no clue when it would be available.

Availability is a very big issue with all Win8 products, I really don't get it.They hyped up the launches of Win8 Tablets and Phones and they are available no where! That's a big part of the problem!

Another example is the Nokia Lumia 920, when was that announced? ...almost 6months ago?! ...and we still don't have it available anywhere?!

Next example would be the Asus Transformer Book (Win8 version), available no-where, eaven though it's been announced a very long time ago....

No wonder sales don't meet expectations with those issues ... I mean I know lots of people that would like to get their hands on those devices... but not possible!